Monday, May 07, 2007

Through a glass, darkly, transcription, dissection, analysis

1 Corinthians 13-6 Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth

In photography compression algorithms are used to reduce image file sizes. The JPEG is the most popular example of this mathematic wizardry.In government, a similar process is used, known as "the minutes". A record, a snap-shot of the governmental meeting, is taken by the on-site stenographer, and this written, compressed distillation is made available to the public.The JPEG is known as a lossy compression method. Some of the image data present in the original photograph goes by the wayside when the the file is reduced in size.Images are strong, they bear up to high compression ratios with much of their original impact intact.

The same can not be said for thoughts and words. I can not offer an average ratio for the compression imposed to the minutes of our legislative and judicial bodies. But I did the math on one speaker before City Council in March and found a compression ratio of 28:1.

1 Comments:

Read the RAW data. Don't get your knickers in a twist, yet. On a different issue, how do you manage to post these really big pictures? Does the size of posted pics depend on the original entered data or is it a blogger tweeking excercise?